It's funny, whenever there's a police shooting of kids with toy guns, I think of all the cap guns I had as a kid. Realistic enough looking, I suppose. In today's climate, would cops be as fine with me and my friends running around the neighbourhood with guns drawn?

I got in an interesting discussion with my coworker after this went down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Andy_Lopez
Basically a 13-year old was carrying an AK-47 replica. Cop pulls up, sounds siren, the kid turns around and apparently raises the weapon, they shoot him.

My initial thought was, if you are a cop and someone is carrying something that really looks like a real gun, obeys orders/warnings and raises at the cop, I don't really see any other option. Coworker brought up a good point. If you are in a sleepy suburb and see a kid with what looks like an AK-47, you need to use some critical thinking and think about the odds that a kid in a suburb is walking around in the middle of the day with a real assault rifle.

Look, you have to establish context for these things. And I maintain that unless you appreciate the Fall of Constantinople, the Great Fire of London, and Mickey Mantle's fatalist alcoholism, live Freddy makes no sense. If you want to half-ass it, fine, go call Simon Schama to do the appendix.

It's funny, whenever there's a police shooting of kids with toy guns, I think of all the cap guns I had as a kid. Realistic enough looking, I suppose. In today's climate, would cops be as fine with me and my friends running around the neighbourhood with guns drawn?

I got in an interesting discussion with my coworker after this went down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Andy_Lopez
Basically a 13-year old was carrying an AK-47 replica. Cop pulls up, sounds siren, the kid turns around and apparently raises the weapon, they shoot him.

My initial thought was, if you are a cop and someone is carrying something that really looks like a real gun, obeys orders/warnings and raises at the cop, I don't really see any other option. Coworker brought up a good point. If you are in a sleepy suburb and see a kid with what looks like an AK-47, you need to use some critical thinking and think about the odds that a kid in a suburb is walking around in the middle of the day with a real assault rifle.

Which goes back to the question of training. Police training has evolved to treat public space as a potential war zone—i.e., enemy combatants and civilians—and so the instilled instinctive response is lethal force. Zero tolerance, as others have observed, means not having to think, merely react. Highly recommend Radley Balko (is that his name?), Rise of the Warrior Cop. He's a libertarian critic of police abuse and does a good job tracing the incremental change in police mission and corresponding tactics.

So someone said there was a group of kids and one had a revolver and the cop sees a group of kids with the clothing match. Given they expect someone to have a gun, this doesn't seem particularly egregious. What am I missing? Other than yeah, pointing a gun at a bunch of kids is awful given they got the wrong group.

Look, you have to establish context for these things. And I maintain that unless you appreciate the Fall of Constantinople, the Great Fire of London, and Mickey Mantle's fatalist alcoholism, live Freddy makes no sense. If you want to half-ass it, fine, go call Simon Schama to do the appendix.

So someone said there was a group of kids and one had a revolver and the cop sees a group of kids with the clothing match. Given they expect someone to have a gun, this doesn't seem particularly egregious. What am I missing? Other than yeah, pointing a gun at a bunch of kids is awful given they got the wrong group.

You would never ever see this happen if those kids were white. That's a stone cold fact.